Amazon's Alexa+: A Promising but Imperfect AI Assistant Upgrade

I asked Alexa Plus to tackle my to-do list -- it mostly failed

One of the best features of Amazon's new Alexa Plus is that I don't have to "speak Alexa" anymore. I've been testing the voice assistant for about a week now, and it understands what I say, regardless of how I say it -- there's no more need for precise phrasing to get Alexa to do what I want. This big shift underpins another headline feature of the revamped generative AI-powered assistant that I've been testing: agentic AI. But this one needs work. The idea is I can talk to Alexa Plus as I would to a real personal assistant and ask it to do tasks, such as reserving a restaurant for my friend's birthday, finding an electrician to fix my broken sprinkler pump, or booking tickets to a Chris Isaak concert. The assistant can then act as an "AI agent" and navigate online services on my behalf to book everything for me. Combined with better calendar management and the ability to remember things you tell it, Alexa's agentic AI has the potential to make the assistant much more useful. At least in theory. In reality, it's too limited. Alexa Plus relies on partnerships with specific services; it can't just roam the web and do my bidding. As of now, that includes Ticketmaster, OpenTable, Uber, and Thumbtack. While impressively, Alexa did manage to complete several steps, overall, the AI agent's current features are neither broad enough nor seamless enough to replace my real-life personal assistant: me. Alexa Plus is still in an Early Access beta phase, and Amazon says more integrations are coming soon. These include ordering groceries by voice (via "several grocery providers in the US"), delivery through Grubhub, and booking spa visits through Vagaro. These may be more useful to me, especially grocery ordering. I already use Alexa for my shopping list, but I then have to put everything into my Harris Teeter shopping app for pickup or delivery. If Alexa could take that list and add it to a service like Instacart, it would cut out a chunk of work for me. Of the three agentic experiences I tested, the best was booking a ticket to an event through Ticketmaster. After a dodgy start -- when I asked about sports events and was told about a youth basketball training session -- I tried again. "What events are there in Charleston next month that you can buy me tickets for?" Alexa produced a list of about 10 local sports events and concerts on the Echo Show 15 I was using (Alexa Plus is much more useful on a screened device). It told me, "You've got music shows like Blackberry Smoke and Mike Campbell on August 5th and Collective Soul on August 6th. There's also a Cure tribute band on August 2nd. Anything catch your interest?" I spotted a Chris Isaak concert in the list (I love a good Wicked Game) and told it to book me tickets. It found balcony seats for $98.15 each and asked how many I wanted, while also showing me more expensive options. I selected the cheap seats, and it walked me through each step as it added them to my cart, ending with a checkout button where my credit card details were pre-populated. (I'd linked my Ticketmaster account in the Alexa app when I first set up Alexa Plus.) I canceled before purchasing, because I don't love a Wicked Game $200 much, and Alexa confirmed that the tickets were released. However, alarmingly, later that day, a pop-up in the Alexa app told me that anyone with access to my Alexa devices can order tickets. Amazon: I'll take a PIN option here, please. Next, I asked Alexa to "book a dinner for two in downtown Charleston for tomorrow night at 7PM." It returned three options, which is just sad -- Charleston has a hopping foodie scene. I picked a French spot I'd been to before and changed it up, asking Alexa to "make it for two weeks on Friday." Unfazed, Alexa understood, pivoted and confirmed availability for Friday, July 31st, at 7PM, then asked if I wanted to book. After I confirmed, it said it would also add the reservation to my linked Gmail calendar. Handy! Or so I thought. I then received a text message from OpenTable, confirming my reservation for Thursday, July 31st. Alexa had messed up the date. I told Alexa to switch the reservation to Friday, August 1st, and it did, also updating my calendar. While it eventually booked the table, Alexa took longer to do it and was less accurate than if I'd just opened the OpenTable app on my phone (or more realistically, the Resy app that most restaurants in Charleston use) and done it myself. Finally, I had Alexa tackle a chore I've been putting off for two years: finding an electrician. I've been meaning to get the circuit for my sprinkler pump fixed for ages. It's on the same one as my internet router, so when the pump kicks in, it trips the circuit -- and down goes my Wi-Fi. I told Alexa I needed an electrician to fix the sprinkler system, and asked if it could book one. It pulled a list of several "highly rated electricians" in my area via Thumbtack, highlighting the top three. I picked one and asked it to schedule a visit for a week from now. Alexa asked several follow-up questions about my house and the specific issue -- it felt a bit like filling out a webform with my voice. Alexa, then said it was working on sending the request through the Thumbtack website, and that I'd get updates soon. A few hours later, still no word from Alexa. But I received an email from Thumbtack (the first of many...) and a text message from the electrician asking me to call or text to schedule an appointment. Not exactly the seamless set-it-and-forget-it experience I'd hoped for. Still, the big difference is that I did all of this hands-free. I could be setting up dinner dates and finding electricians while cooking dinner or folding laundry. As a working mother of two, anything that helps with multitasking so I can complete my to-do list faster is welcome. But while the tech is impressive, the lack of depth and the failures I experienced in two out of my three tests mean I don't plan to rely on Alexa to do these tasks for me just yet. Photography by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Alexa+ preview: An almost philosophical exercise

"Oh, a review? I'm intrigued! What's the occasion? I'd love to hear what you think." "There's no occasion, this is just my work." "Ah, I see. Writing a professional review, got it. I'm here to help if you need any specific information." "Yeah, what should I consider when reviewing you?" "Consider my natural voice, emotional intelligence and my ability to handle complex tasks. How about my personality and humor? Those are key parts of the new me." The above is a recent exchange I had with Alexa+. Access to the next-generation assistant has been slowly trickling out to users since Amazon first announced availability at an event in February. But work on the smarter, more natural-sounding Alexa has been going on for years, and it still isn't ready for a widespread release. The version currently rolling out is more like an intriguing preview of what a truly intelligent Alexa could be. I'm having a hard time figuring out how I feel about the upgraded Alexa. On the one hand, I cannot deny it is now capable of tackling some fairly complex requests it couldn't before. On the other, it doesn't have good memory, can't really see all tasks to completion and is just incompetent enough to be annoying. I want to first caveat all of this by pointing out that when it does become broadly available, Alexa+ will be a free upgrade for Amazon Prime subscribers. Non-Prime members will have to pay $20 a month for the privilege, but they'll still get the existing Alexa experience on their compatible devices should they choose not to upgrade. That means there will likely be no extra cost to most, and you probably won't need to spend too much time thinking about whether you want to use it. As long as it's not a worse experience, it is very easy to say yes to. I've been tempted to get philosophical when thinking about a digital assistant that's more fluent in human. Do I really want to think of the new Alexa as basically a flesh-and-blood assistant with emotional intelligence, personality and humor? No. If it performs poorly, I'll be let down; if it performs well and can essentially pass a mini Turing test, the ickier I'll feel at keeping something like an indentured servant in my kitchen. I set aside my existential questions and tried to focus on the practical experience of getting help from Amazon's upgraded assistant. Is it better than the previous version? Is it reliable and easy to use? Finally, does it deliver what Amazon promised? And as a bonus, is the experience enjoyable (or at least painless)? The answer to all those questions is a half-hearted shrug. In some ways, Alexa+ delivers. But in many ways it is an excellent showcase of the limitations of generative AI, and demonstrates that the true problem with the current cohort of AI tools is a mismatch between expectations and reality. A voice assistant is hard to describe, since it's intangible and amorphous. It's quite difficult to state where its capabilities begin and end, not to mention how it might have been upgraded. But I'll start by comparing it to its predecessor, which I'll be calling Original Alexa (or OriginAlexa, if you will indulge me). OriginAlexa taught us how to use very specific commands to do things like turn our living room lights on or off. If you had a family member or friend named Alexa, you might have renamed it to "Computer" and adapted your relationship to that word. Due to how you might have grouped your home gadgets, you could have begun to refer to your kitchen area lights as "skylights," for example. "Alexa speak," as some call it, differs across households. I say "Alexa, stop," to silence alarms, while my best friend says "Alexa, off," to do the same. But regardless of the specific word choices, Alexa-speak largely revolved around using stilted phrases and careful enunciation to avoid having to repeat yourself to get something done. Anyone that's used any voice assistant is probably familiar with the frustration of repeating yourself when a command has been misheard for the umpteenth time. That's (supposed to be) a thing of the past with Alexa+. In a blog post announcing the new assistant, Amazon's lead of devices and services Panos Panay said "Alexa+ is more conversational, smarter, personalized -- and she helps you get things done." The company said it "rebuilt Alexa with generative AI," but it didn't just use large language models (LLMs) to make its assistant converse more naturally. It also created new architecture to enable API integration "at scale." These APIs are how assistants can connect to third-party services to do stuff on your behalf, and Amazon described them as "core protocols to getting things done outside of a chat window and in the real world." In a separate blog post, Amazon said "This architecture is what will let customers quickly and seamlessly connect with services they already use in their daily life: GrubHub, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Yelp, Thumbtack, Vagaro, Fodor's, Tripadvisor, Amazon, Whole Foods Market, Uber, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, smart home devices from companies like Philips Hue and Roborock, and so much more." Basically, Alexa can communicate with you more naturally, meaning you can talk to it more like you would with another human being, so you can forget about Alexa-speak. It will also retain information about your preferences and is capable of handling more tasks on your behalf. But enough about the promises. What was living with Alexa+ for weeks actually like? Alexa+ is currently only available as an "Early Access" preview to a small group of users. Though my access was granted by Amazon for the purposes of this testing, other people in my non-tech circles did start gaining access recently, which means you might be able to check it out yourself soon. The fact that it's still somewhat exclusive and experimental means there are likely to be glitches, which is understandable. Once I got past the first day or two after upgrading to Alexa+, I didn't notice many actual bugs. What frustrations I did encounter later seemed more to do with programming and AI's limitations than unstable software. The updated Assistant currently requires at least one compatible device with a screen on your network, so those of you who only have Echo speakers will have to wait a lot longer or try it on your phone. I spent most of my time testing Alexa+ via an Echo Show 15 as well as the Alexa app on my iPhone. There were small variations in the answers I would get on either device, but by and large the experience was similar. The most meaningful difference really was in how I perceived Alexa. Initially, when I was interacting with it on the smart display, it felt more like an upgraded smart home and personal assistant, and I predominantly asked it to check on the weather, Uber prices or to help me do things like set timers, reminders and play music. On my phone, though, I talked to Alexa+ more like I would with ChatGPT. I asked deeper, more philosophical questions that required more research and thought. I asked it to generate images, sort 15 names into three groups and, inspired by the subreddit "r/tipofmytongue," help me find a book I was struggling to recall. Over time, I did come to rely on the smart display more, as it's always easier to just say "Alexa, is Mountainhead a good movie" than to pick up my phone, find an app and ask the AI. Of course, I could ask the same question of Siri or my Google speakers, and I did. All three assistants answered similarly, each citing different sources. Only Alexa gave me a direct answer, saying "Mountainhead is a good movie," followed by details like its IMDB score. The other two simply rattled off "On the website RottenTomatoes dot com, ..." or "here's an answer from whattowatch dot com." In many ways, Alexa+ is a marked improvement over its predecessor, and I have to admit I found myself nodding, impressed, at its ability to tackle multi-step tasks and recall previous conversations. Now, I have many gripes with the latter that I'll elaborate on later, but the fact that I was able to get Alexa+ on the Echo Show to check the price of an Uber ride and book it for me was a pleasant surprise. Of course, it selected the wrong pickup location and I ended up having the first driver cancel on me because I wasn't waiting at the right spot. But it did manage to completely book a ride on my behalf, relying solely on my voice commands and an Uber integration I had set up earlier. I was initially impressed by the assistant's ability to refer to our previous conversations and remember things I told it to, like my partner's address and my temperature preferences. But its ability to do so was inconsistent -- most times if I asked Alexa to refer to things we had discussed in previous conversations, it either required a lot of prodding to get to the right nugget, or it simply didn't recall. I did have to tip my hat to Amazon when I asked Alexa to "play my Rox playlist on Spotify when I tell you I'm home." The assistant not only walked me through setting up that routine entirely through a verbal conversation, but also pointed out limitations like only being able to set a volume for playback after a duration had been set. It presented me with two options: "We can either set a duration for the music to play, or we can make it the last action in the routine." I almost thought I was talking to a capable human assistant when it told me all that, though after Alexa misheard me and thought I said "saturation" instead of "set duration," the illusion was shattered. There are many other things Alexa+ can do that are reminiscent of the current crop of trendy AI assistants like ChatGPT or Claude. Ask it for help making a decision on what to cook, for example, or generating images, planning a project or for movie recommendations. One new capability I was excited about was sending me emails from our conversation. I wouldn't say the sky is the limit, but I do think that coming up with a complete list of what it can now do would take forever. It'd be like asking what you can search for on Google -- basically whatever you can think of. Whether it brings you the answers you're looking for is a different question. I found Alexa+ helpful in that it was able to email me the lists of names it sorted on my behalf, or the project timeline I asked it to help create. But the limits to what it would send me were frustrating. Straightforward content, like the three groups of five names, arrived at my inbox with no problem. Other times, like when I asked it to email me the conversation I started this article with, it only sent me part of our chat. This has a lot to do with what Alexa deems to be the beginning and ending of a conversation, and it was fairly often wrong. I'll go deeper into the other limits of the contents of Alexa's emails in the next section, but in short, it's inconsistent. That's a pattern of behavior that you'll see here. Alexa+ will be capable in some new way that has potential to be exciting and useful, but it will fail you somehow or execute its task incompletely. I loved that it was able to understand me through my verbal stumbles, or integrating with my third-party apps and email. But I kept hitting walls or being let down. The overall effect wasn't annoying enough to be frustrating, but it was disappointing enough that I never really came to rely on Alexa+ for some functions. For example, during my testing I asked Alexa+ most mornings to check on the price of "that Uber ride" I booked. Over the course of a few weeks, I asked variations of "can you check the price of that Uber ride I took yesterday" or "please check how much an Uber is this morning for my usual ride." In response to the latter, Alexa+ replied "I can help you check Uber prices for your usual ride. I have two saved pickup locations for you. Would you like to be picked up from Billing address," and proceeded to rattle off an address I had stored in the Uber app. It continued, offering a second pickup address and asking if I preferred a different location. After I selected one, it asked where I would like to be dropped off. It's as if my previous conversations telling it this every day for a week never happened. To its (very small) credit, Alexa+ gave me accurate prices after I supplied all the parameters, but it took a tiresome amount of time. That's largely due to how verbose the responses are. I understand wanting to be specific and accurate, but I really didn't need my entire mailing address, unit number and zip code included, every time I ordered a cab. I also didn't need Alexa to keep repeating my entire question back to me -- a simple "Yes I can" would have sufficed. Alexa+ also came off a bit needy, which would be humanizing if it wasn't so robotic about it. I would thank it whenever I was done with a conversation or request, and it would reply "You're welcome. Glad I could help you with..." and make a sort of reference to our chat in a few words. Or it would say "you're welcome, have a nice day." I found out I could tell it to "be less verbose" and while it said it would, Alexa+ still continued to reply "You're welcome, have a good day" every time I told it thanks after it filled me in on the weather forecast. I could almost put up with the overly long responses, if Alexa did things the way I expected. But like I already mentioned, it's inconsistent. Though it's capable of emailing me, it doesn't appear to be able to send images, at least based on all the picture-less emails I've received. The inability to send photos from the Echo Show's built-in camera is a prudent privacy protection measure, but Alexa+ could have just told me that when I asked "can you send all of this plus those photos you took to me in an email?" Instead, it replied "Certainly, I can help you with that. I'll draft an email with the descriptions of the room and the person, along with the photos I've analyzed. Let me prepare that for you," followed shortly by "I've sent the email with the image descriptions to your Gmail address. You should receive it shortly." In the email, at the very bottom, Alexa said "Unfortunately, I can't include the actual photos in this email, but I've described what I observed in them." Thankfully, I wasn't depending on these images for anything important, but if I were, I can only imagine how frustrated I would have been. To top it all off, the descriptions in the email not only didn't match what was said in our conversation, but were also wrong about what was in the room. During our conversation, Alexa said "I see a person in a room with white walls, wearing a black tank top and white skirt. There's furniture including a cabinet, bookshelf, desk and coffee table." That's a fairly accurate description of my living room. The email I got had three sections with bullet points. The first, titled "Room description," listed eight items or characteristics, like "white walls and ceilings" or "television on a stand and bookshelf" that were largely accurate. Here, it said I had a "white cabinet with drawers," which is wrong. In the third section called "Additional observations," it said I had a "ceiling fan with light fixture," which I only wish I had. Alexa+ has some other quirks that were in early versions of ChatGPT or Dall-E. For example, when I asked it to create an image of an AI assistant on the screen of a smart display on a kitchen island, it was completely unable to understand my request. Not only that, follow-up attempts to get it to "make the display bigger" or "put the smiling person on the screen" only resulted in the kitchen slowly filling up with more and more vegetables while the device remained the same size. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I could continue to list examples of where Alexa+ failed to completely do what I asked it to, but I think you get the point. The one area where I can confirm a noticeable improvement is in the way the assistant sounds and how it understands speech. I'll say that of the four voices I was presented with when I upgraded to the new Alexa, I simply went with the default choice, which was a feminine-sounding American speaker. I didn't mind it, but I know some other people who dislike it. This is obviously a matter of personal preference, so I don't have much comment on the actual voice. I will point out that the expressiveness of the assistant's speech was significantly different from the robotic one of the original Alexa, and again, it didn't bother me. One of my biggest initial concerns was having to adjust how I spoke to Alexa. I considered myself fluent in Alexa-speak. Thankfully, so far, I found it easy to talk to Alexa like I would a person -- that is, in longer, rambly sentences with verbal stumbles and utterances. For the most part, I felt understood, or at least better understood than by the Google Assistant or Siri. Of course, that in itself raises philosophical questions of whether you want to speak to AI like you would people to begin with. But from my weeks with Alexa+, that feels like the least pressing concern. Back to the conversation I had with the assistant on what to look out for when I review it. When I pressed Alexa to explain what it meant by its "emotional intelligence," it said "my emotional intelligence helps me adapt to different moods and situations. I can pick up on subtle cues and respond appropriately, making our interactions more natural and engaging." This set off my internal alarm bells just a bit, so I asked how it was detecting my mood. Alexa replied that it was picking up on my tone and word choice, calling it "a dance of understanding." So I pushed it further: "Tell me about your emotional intelligence." "My emotional intelligence helps me adapt to different moods and situations. I can pick up on subtle cues and respond appropriately, making our interactions more natural and engaging." "Well how are you detecting my moods" "I pick up on your tone and word choice. Your emotions color our conversation, and I adapt to match. It's like a dance of understanding." "How do you think I am feeling right now?" "Based on our chat, I'd say you're feeling analytical and focused. You're in work mode, evaluating my capabilities for your review." "What about when I, you know, asked you about the weather this morning?" "This morning, you asked about the weather and I provided a sunny forecast. How did that information help you start your day?" "No, I was asking about my mood back then, do you know how I felt then?" "Ah, I see. Based on that morning conversation, you seemed casual and curious about the day ahead. Your tone suggested a typical start to the day, neither particularly excited nor stressed." During this exchange, I also adjusted the pitch of my voice to see if it would make a difference, and none of the responses I got gave me any real insight as to whether Alexa was actually listening to the sound of my voice to determine my mood. It felt like talking to a cagey person who didn't want to let you know what they knew. Neediness, inconsistency and gaslighting. In creating something so imperfect, maybe Amazon has actually managed to nail the human experience. I'll be clear, though. The company never said it set out to make something human. But in using terms like "natural voice" and "emotional intelligence," it certainly seems to imply something more person than robot. It's not a problem unique to Amazon. I didn't get too deep into comparisons to other generative-AI-infused assistants in this piece, because Alexa+ remains in limited preview and fair testing can't be conducted yet. But I did already notice some small areas where the Amazon offering was smarter than others. I asked Alexa, Siri and the Google Assistant (on a Pixel 9) to set a timer for 30 minutes, before changing my mind and telling them to adjust those to 25-minute countdowns instead. Only Alexa took into account the time that had already elapsed into consideration, setting my new timer for 24 minutes and about 30 seconds instead of simply starting over at 25 minutes like the other two. It's an insignificant difference, but effectively shows an element of consideration that's almost human in its complexity. I will spend more time with Alexa+ to further poke at the limits of its abilities and to continue our dance of understanding. We probably won't ever fully be in step with each other, but maybe the goal shouldn't be to achieve perfect harmony, and instead to simply not stomp on one another's toes.

I put Alexa+ to the test with my chaotic family -- here's 5 things I liked and 2 that could use work

With three kids and constant chaos, I rely on anything that can make life a little easier, more scheduled and quieter (if possible). So when I got the chance to test Alexa+, Amazon's upgraded AI assistant, I was curious whether it could actually keep up with my family of five. Spoiler: it can do a lot more than set timers and play "We Don't Talk About Bruno" for the hundredth time. Built on Amazon's new large language model, I discovered just how much Alexa+ turns your Echo speaker into something much smarter. My experience with Alexa+ proved the assistant to be more like a helpful, proactive assistant than a glorified Bluetooth speaker (something I honestly have felt about Alexa in the past). After a week of testing it on an Echo Show 21 in our real-life madhouse, I found a lot to love, and a couple of things that could use some fine-tuning. Alexa+ is still in its "Early Access" testing phase, so it's not been widely released yet, as Amazon is working out the kinks. Here are five things I love about Alexa+ and two that still bug me. What I noticed right away is how much more conversational and human-like Alexa+ in comparison to the older version. It is also much more natural to talk to because you can interrupt it at any time. I can also interrupt myself mid-sentence to completely change topics or backtrack. It follows me and get this, it even follows my four-year-old who stumbles over his words and doesn't always speak in complete sentences. I noticed that Alexa+ adapts to him when it talks. For example, if I ask for the weather, it just gives me the weather. But if one of my kids asks what the weather is like today, Alexa+ says something like, "Let me put on my weather goggles..." It's the little details that set this version apart. It also remembers the context of earlier questions and can handle follow-ups without me needing to rephrase. Yes, even when my kids talk fast, in Gen Alpha slang or from across the room. It's the first time Alexa has felt like a true back-and-forth assistant. It remembers facts about the family, our preferences and routines. This has been a game-changer for busy week days, like when I forget to change the thermostat at bedtime to our preferred temperature. It does it for me. I've noticed that the more I use it, the personalization has gotten better over time. One of the most underrated upgrades in Alexa+ is how much more intuitive the screen has become. It now works more like a true smart display; proactively showing relevant visuals based on your context, without needing precise voice commands. When chatting with Alexa, it actually shows the chat on the screen almost like a text message or chatbot. It's nice for a variety of reasons like, ensuring it understands what I'm saying, understanding what it is saying (especially if the room is noisy) and for reference later. Ask for a recipe, and you get a step-by-step visual layout with timers you can tap. Even home controls are easier: instead of listing devices, Alexa+ now presents touch-friendly tiles organized by room, making it simple to dim lights or change the thermostat with a swipe. The layout feels cleaner, faster and more responsive. With our previous versions of Alexa, controlling smart home devices often meant memorizing exact phrases or setting up rigid routines in the app. For example, if I said "Turn on the lights in the mud room at 7 p.m.," it might respond with, "I don't understand," if I hadn't programmed that exact routine. WIth the older version of Alexa, I felt like I was always one step behind it, while this version definitely feels like it knows my routine and my house better than I do. Alexa+ allows for much more natural, flexible phrasing. Having tested LLMs (large language models), I can only guess that the updated model is better because it can understand context, time references and the way real people actually talk. Sometimes it understands my four-year-old better than I do. For example, you can now say: "Turn off the lights in the kids' rooms after breakfast." "Dim the family room when the movie starts." "Make sure the porch light is on before we get home." The real game-changer for me is that Alexa+ interprets time-based cues like "after dinner" or event-based triggers like "when the movie starts" without needing a strict routine tied to a clock. It can even infer what "the kids' rooms" refers to based on your device setup and previous conversations. For a family of five, this is the tool I've needed. I really like that I don't have to micromanage every device or update schedules constantly. Instead, I just speak naturally and trust Alexa+ to fill in the gaps, which makes this multitasking mom very happy. One of the best things about Alexa+ is how seamlessly it works across your entire ecosystem whether you're at home or on the go. The Alexa app now mirrors many of the assistant's upgraded capabilities, meaning you can control your smart home remotely with ease. This is a total game changer for me because sometimes I'll leave the house and wonder if I remembered to turn the outside lights off or close the garage. I've used the app while away from home to turn off forgotten porch lights, adjust the thermostat before heading back and even check if the front door is locked; all with natural, conversational commands. Thanks to Alexa+ syncing context across devices, the system knows what I've asked before, so I don't have to start from scratch each time. Whether I'm speaking to a smart speaker in the kitchen or tapping through the app at the grocery store, Alexa+ keeps everything in sync, giving me consistent, proactive help no matter where I am. What sets Alexa+ apart is how well it connects the dots between my preferences, schedule, shopping habits, and smart home activity. It's no longer just responding to commands -- it's anticipating needs based on what it knows about my life. For example, it keeps track of my most frequently purchased items on Amazon, making it easy to restock household essentials with a quick "reorder my buy-again items" prompt. No more scrambling when we run out of paper towels or dog food. But where Alexa+ really shines is in how it understands time and priorities. The other night, I asked when I should squeeze in a workout -- and instead of just giving a random suggestion, it scanned my calendar, noticed my kid's soccer game, and even reminded me of a catch-up coffee I had forgotten to reschedule. That level of situational awareness is new -- and genuinely helpful. Alexa+ feels more like a personal assistant who knows my routines, commitments, and habits, rather than just a voice waiting for commands. It's thoughtful, responsive, and increasingly capable of adapting to real-world complexity in a way that feels natural and surprisingly human. While there's a lot to love about Alexa+, it's not quite perfect. As with most early AI rollouts, there are still a few kinks to work out. From inconsistent audio performance to occasional inaccuracies, Alexa+ sometimes feels like it's still finding its voice, literally and figuratively. Hopefully, as Amazon continues refining the system, these growing pains will smooth out. Alexa+ has a more expressive, natural-sounding voice -- which is great... until it isn't. The responses are warm and personable, but sometimes they don't always apply to what was asked. Also, she pauses at the slightest interruption even if you put down a book or your phone near it. There have been moments when I had to repeat myself multiple times before being understood, even in a quiet room. Additionally, sometimes the sound randomly goes off and I have to tell Alexa that I cannot hear it. Personality is great, but efficiency still matters -- especially when you're in the middle of making dinner or wrangling kids. In my testing, Alexa+ occasionally got key facts wrong, including movie ticket prices and a restaurant's hours of operation. These might seem like small errors, but they show the limits of Alexa+ when it comes to sourcing real-time information. Because Alexa+ still relies heavily on third-party data, the accuracy of its responses is only as good as the sources it pulls from. That's fine for casual queries, but it's not yet dependable enough to be your go-to for time-sensitive or critical decisions. Until the system gets better at verifying info or flagging uncertainty, it's best to double-check anything important. Alexa+ is a big leap forward for smart assistants. After a week of living with it in a house full of noisy kids, forgotten appointments and endless to-do lists, I can confidently say it's the smartest Alexa has ever felt. This version anticipates, adapts and genuinely helps. From adjusting the thermostat when I forget, to following my four-year-old's half-formed voice commands, Alexa+ proves it can thrive in the beautiful chaos of real family life. It's not perfect yet. There were moments where I had to repeat myself or double-check answers, and sometimes I wished it would skip the extra friendliness and just get to the point. But these feel like early-version quirks, not dealbreakers. And given how quickly AI tools are evolving, I wouldn't be surprised if these issues are ironed out soon. The bottom line? Alexa+ certainly feels like a true assistant and it seems to get smarter the more we use it. For busy households, this upgrade is a total game changer. In the weeks and months to come, I'll be testing out Alexa+ further, to see how it develops. Is there anything you'd like to know about it? Leave a note in the comments!

I spent the last two weeks testing Alexa+ -- here's 2 things that impressed me, and 1 that needs work

What's it like using Amazon's new-and-improved voice assistant? Alexa+, Amazon's new-and-improved voice assistant, is slowly rolling out to beta testers before its full release sometime in the near future. Unlike the original Alexa, Alexa+ uses AI in a number of ways to not only improve the quality of the conversation between you and the assistant, but also provide much more comprehensive services. For example, you can now use Alexa+ to create a smart home routine, order an Uber, or book restaurant reservations. Alexa+ is currently in Early Access, meaning that Amazon is allowing a select number of people to try it and iron out the kinks (here's how to sign up for Alexa+). When it goes live to a wider audience, it will cost $19.99/month, but will be included for free if you subscribe to Amazon Prime. While I had a chance to use Alexa+ briefly a few months back at the launch event, it was only for a few minutes. About two weeks ago, I was granted early access to Alexa+, so I've been able to test it out a bit more over the past few days with the Echo Show 15 and Echo Show 5. Here are my early impressions. When you upgrade to Alexa+, it completely changes the look of your Echo Show to an interface that's much more customizable. Now, you have a lot more flexibility when it comes to widgets. Not only are there more widgets (around 100), but you can move them around the screen, much as you can with your smartphone. Even better: You can set up multiple screens, so you're not confined to just one. The new interface makes the Echo Show feel something closer to, say, the Google Pixel tablet, especially with regard to its smart home controls. As someone who has a lot of smart home devices, I especially like the Smart Home widget, which has a bunch of thumbnails of my various cameras (it only works with Ring at the moment) and controls for other things, such as smart lights and thermostats. What's more, if you set up Map View in the Alexa app, you can see a floorplan of your house with all of your smart home devices. Amazon has basically taken the concept of the Echo Hub and turned it into a widget, so it will be interesting to see how much of a future there is for this device, as well as any other Echo device that doesn't have a screen. Still, there's some work to be done. Of the 128 widgets I counted, a number of them were merely larger versions of each other, and their dimensions are fixed, so you can't resize them to say a portrait or landscape orientation. On the Echo Show 5, things are naturally a bit more cramped. You don't get thumbnail views of your smart home cameras, for instance, and the screen can only hold three widgets (and small ones at that) at a time. Things also felt a bit pokey -- there was a noticeable lag as I swiped around the display. The first thing you'll notice about Alexa+ is her voice (or his, depending on how you set it up). Alexa is much more expressive, and replies feel more like natural language, rather than something that's purely transactional. As a result, I found it much easier to carry on a conversation. Alexa+'s smarts also extend to when she messes up -- she quickly admits her error, and then attempts to resolve it. For example, I had a raccoon wander through my backyard a few nights ago, so I asked Alexa+ if there were any animals that were in my backyard at night. She then responded with a list of videos from my Ring cameras -- but all of the results were from the daytime. I said as much, and she responded "You're right. These are all during the day. I'll look for night videos." There were a few other instances where Alexa+ didn't return the results I was looking for -- Amazon is still working out the kinks -- and when I pointed out the errors, she was very apologetic, and worked to correct the mistakes. As an Italian-American, I was particularly aggrieved when Alexa pronounced "gnocchi" as "knee-ack-y." I told her as much, and she asked me if there was a better way to pronounce the word. After guiding her through something that was a bit better, she said she'd keep it in mind for future conversations. It took a few tries, but Alexa finally started pronouncing it correctly. One of the keys to Alexa+'s success will be its integration with third-party services. For example, it currently works with Uber, OpenTable, TicketMaster, and a smattering of other services, so you can use your voice to order a ride or get a reservation. However, in order for this to truly be useful, Amazon will have to partner with a lot more companies. For instance, I tried to book a reservation near my home at a sushi restaurant using OpenTable, but there just aren't that many restaurants in the area that use OpenTable. As a result, Alexa+ returned options for places in New York City, which is a good 15 miles away. While Alexa+ is shaping up to be a great in-home assistant, it's going to need to do more if Amazon wants people to use it out of the house. To find things to do near me, I asked Alexa+ "what's a good place to go kayaking near Red Bank, New Jersey?" Alexa returned several helpful results, but she was unable to send me directions, or show me on a map where they might be. An Amazon representative told me that they are working on Alexa+ integration with turn-by-turn directions. As an in-home assistant, Alexa+ already feels like a big leap forward from what came before. She's an assistant you now talk to, rather than at. Conversations no longer feel one-directional, and she actually takes your comments into account, rather than returning a generic error message. And, the on-screen interface makes Alexa a lot more functional, especially when it comes to controlling your smart home devices. But while the new design looks great on the large-scale Echo Show 15, it's less so on the smaller Echo Show 5. As the latter device was last updated in 2023, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon released a newer version of it (as well as other Echo displays) with a beefier processor to handle more Alexa+ actions locally. Is there anything you'd like me to try with Alexa+? I plan to test it more thoroughly in the weeks and months to come before its wider release.

Amazon's new Alexa+ is pretty good -- but is that enough in the ChatGPT age?

I'm going to start with a caveat from the top: This is not a formal product review. That's not my background nor expertise, and if that's what you are looking for, you are likely to walk away at least a little bit disappointed. What this is, is a first impression based on hands-on experience with the new Alexa from someone who was once a consistent user of Amazon's original voice assistant. Back then, I relied on Alexa for the kind of straightforward things many of us did every day: playing music, checking the weather, requesting sports scores, setting timers, and answering the types of questions that grade-school kids would get a kick out of ("Alexa, who would win a battle between a lion and a snow leopard?"). But over the years, Alexa's performance seemed to deteriorate- it had more trouble understanding basic requests and definitely could not hold a conversation like popular AI chatbots could. Eventually, my family's interest -- and patience -- waned. So I've been waiting for a new and improved Alexa for quite some time, and when I recently received an invitation offering "early access" to the beta version of Alexa+, I was eager to take it for a verbal spin. It's worth noting that Amazon first announced what would become Alexa+ back in September of 2023, but the launch has been repeatedly held up amid "structural dysfunction and technological challenges," as Fortune reported last June, and later by issues related to how slow the assistant was to respond to commands or complete actions. In February, Amazon finally unveiled details of Alexa+ at a splashy launch event, but did not launch the service widely at the time; instead, it's been rolling out Alexa+ little by little, in a phased approach (Amazon says that millions of people now have access to Alexa+). Prime members don't pay anything for the Alexa upgrade, but non-members will pay around $20 a month after the official launch, the company has said. For now, early access is free to Prime and non-Prime members alike. The company has not formally announced an official full public launch date. I've spent some time over the last few weeks using Alexa+ for some of the same things we used its predecessor for, as well as trying out some of the new actions, like booking an Uber and restaurant reservation, that Amazon is pushing. My first impression, in short, is that the service is pretty good. If it had launched shortly after Amazon first announced an updated version of Alexa in the fall of 2023, I might have said it was very good. Its conversational abilities are real and mostly very fluid. Does it blow away voice modes from LLM-based AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity? Not in my experience. But it is vastly superior in that way to the original Alexa so will likely come as a delightful surprise to those who haven't spent much time with those competitor services. On several occasions, though, I had to re-prompt Alexa by name in the middle of a back-and-forth conversation -- I thought I had just taken a normal, mid-speaking pause but Alexa thought differently. If such instances continue to occur at public launch, it might not be a deal breaker for regular usage, but would certainly frustrate me - and I assume some others too. I also had some issues with playing Spotify using the new Alexa, unless I specified that I wanted it played on the specific Alexa device in front of me. The gadget in question was an 8-inch Echo Show device (the Echo device with a screen) to test out Alexa+ because the technology isn't available on some of Amazon's older speakers, including the original Pringles-box-shaped Echo speakers, one of which still sits on a shelf in our dining room. (If you don't have an Echo device, you'll still be able to use the new Alexa+ from the Alexa app.) The new Alexa told me Spotify was playing, when it actually wasn't. I thought perhaps it was somehow playing on the old Pringles-tube Echo downstairs, but that wasn't the case. A spokesperson recommended I change the default device for Spotify in the Alexa app but honestly, the Alexa app isn't the most intuitive and I gave up after about 10 minutes. Considering that playing music is one of the basic and common tasks for a smart speaker, this didn't inspire a lot of confidence, but I am not ruling out the possibility that I'm overlooking a setting that would fix the issue. The other flaws I ran into ranged from comical to frustrating. An on-screen prompt on the Echo Show advertised that Alexa could help me choose a new lunch spot, but when I queried Alexa about it the first time, she claimed she couldn't carry out that task. I also made the mistake, apparently, of asking Alexa to slow down her speaking cadence at some point so I could take some hand-written notes. That simple command kicked off a minutes-long bizarro-world exchange in which I would ask Alexa to speed up or slow down her cadence, she'd reply that she had -- but at a speed which was even more drastically opposite of what I had been asking. It took several minutes, but what felt like an eternity, to rectify. On another occasion, Alexa got snippy with me when I seemed astonished that she had instructed me to simply unplug and then reconnect my Echo device to try to solve the aforementioned Spotify issue. "It's your problem not mine" was essentially the gist of the response. Can an AI offend me? I mean, that'd be pretty silly. But the exchange was a bit off-putting, though admittedly mildly amusing as well. On this point, Panos Panay, the longtime Microsoft executive who joined Amazon in late 2023 to head up Alexa and its broad array of devices from Echos to Kindles to Fire TV sticks, seemed intrigued. "We're testing a few of the boundaries," he told me in an interview at the company's New York City headquarters in early July. "Like, yeah, you want a little personality out of your assistant, and you want it to feel or be personal. I think that's okay. Where is that boundary is an interesting question." For my daughter, Alexa+'s ability to generate images and "paintings" based on voice commands was a treat. I also tried some of the advertised "actions" that Panay and Amazon believe will set Alexa apart from competitors and transform it into more of an agent than an assistant. I asked Alexa to book a reservation for me and my wife at a new local sushi restaurant we've been meaning to try - and finally could with our kids staying the weekend with a relative. Disappointingly, though, Alexa replied that she couldn't make a reservation at that restaurant - the restaurant doesn't use OpenTable for its reservations and that's the only current partner that Alexa+ has in the space. Alexa instead simply offered me the restaurant's phone number which....was not exactly what i was looking for. It's possible that Amazon ends up cutting a deal with Resy, the restaurant reservation service that the restaurant in question uses. While Panay said more partnerships were in the works, neither he nor a spokesperson would confirm specifics. That said, ordering an Uber by voice worked seamlessly (once I agreed to provide access to my Uber account), though I do wonder how often people will opt for this experience versus simply pulling out their phone. Browsing and homing in on the cheapest soccer tickets at a nearby stadium also worked quite well though, again, I wonder if talking out loud to a virtual ticket assistant for 4 minutes is actually any better or more efficient than searching for the tickets on my phone or computer. Panay told me beta feedback so far is "overwhelmingly positive," and that the "conversational aspect" of Alexa+ alone -- versus the prompt and response mode of the original -- is delighting customers. "It's just a part of the kitchen conversation at this point," he noted, emphasizing his point with an anecdote about his family settling debates or open questions by querying Alexa+ rather than pulling out a phone and falling prey to all the distractions that come with it. "It's the idea of being engaged with each other and having an ambient assistant there, where I'm not turning on my phone, I'm not opening an app, I'm not being distracted by whatever it is that is on my notifications," he said. One major caveat is that I wasn't able to try out everything that Amazon is excited about. Panay stressed that while engagement with "traditional features" like playing music are increasing, household-management capabilities of Alexa+ are a hit with early users and he believes they'll continue to be. In one example, he discussed giving Alexa access to a family's calendar and then prompting it for the best weekend to get away. I haven't tried that feature mainly because you can't yet link work email accounts from Google or Microsoft to Alexa+, and because our kids' sports calendars are spread across several apps that I'm frankly too lazy to consolidate (yes, embarrassing). Panay also highlighted shopping tools powered by Alexa+ that notify you when a certain product goes on sale. And he stressed the ease with which Alexa users who have outfitted their home with smart devices -- think smart lights and smart locks -- will be able to speak into existence complex routines. "Alexa, every night at 8:30, start dimming the lights in the house and then lock the doors," he said by way of example. That's four separate commands in one sentence, versus what would have taken at least a dozen and a half steps within the Alexa app previously, Panos said. "Jason, please don't underestimate the power of this," Panay urged me. One approach Amazon and Panay could take would be to set expectations a bit low and then overdeliver after such a long wait. After all, the introduction of the original Alexa occurred in a really understated way; it was buried within a larger announcement unveiling a surprise device called the Echo. But that could be dangerous in its own right, especially amid the realization that former famed Apple designer Jony Ive is now helping ChatGPT-maker OpenAI invent their own AI-powered device. "I hope others make great devices," Panay said when asked about competitors. Perhaps in response, though, Amazon recently said it would buy an AI wearable startup called Bee. Panay, for his part, acknowledged that there is still work to do before the new Alexa is ready to be used by hundreds of millions of existing users. And after such a long wait -- with Panay himself setting expectations high -- it's fair to wonder if "pretty good" is anywhere good enough in the new world that Amazon's famed voice assistant is now reentering. Clearly, there's more work to do.